Saturday, December 12, 2009

Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be completely wrong, I would think that they will have been very thoroughly forgotten by the time 2020 rolls around.)And so, without further ado, here are my predictions for what it will be like in The United States of America during the second decade of the XXI century.

The decade will be marked by many instances of autophagy, in business, government, and in the higher echelons of society, as players at all levels find that they are unable to control their appetites or alter their behavior in any meaningful way, even in the face of radically altered circumstances, and are thus compelled to consume themselves into oblivion, as so many disemboweled yet still ravenous sharks endlessly gorging themselves on their own billowing entrails.

Governments will find that they are unable to restrain themselves from printing ever more money in an endless wave of uncontrolled emission. At the same time, rising taxes, commodity prices, and costs of all kinds, coupled with a rising overall level of uncertainty and disruption, will curtail economic activity to a point where little of that money will still circulate. Inflationists and deflationists will endlessly debate whether this should be called inflation or deflation, unconsciously emulating the big-endians and little-endians of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels, who endlessly debated the proper end from which to eat a soft-boiled egg. The citizenry, their nest egg boiled down to the size of a dried pea, will not be particularly vexed by the question of exactly how they should try to eat it, and will regard the question as academic, if not idiotic.

Distressed municipalities throughout the country will resort to charging exorbitant fees for such things as dog licenses. Many will experiment with imprisoning those unable to pay these fees in state and county jails, only to release them again as the jails continuously overflow and resources run low. The citizenry will come to regard jails as conveniently combining the features of a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter. Some towns will abandon the idea of having a fire department and decide that it is more cost-effective to just let house fires run their course, to save on demolitions. In an effort to plug up ever larger holes in their budgets, states will raise taxes, driving ever more economic activity underground. In particular, state liquor tax revenues will drop for the first time in many decades as more and more Americans find that they can no longer afford beer and switch to cheap and plentiful Afghan heroin and other illegal but very affordable drugs. Marijuana smoke will edge out car exhaust as America's most prevalent smell.

Several countries around the world will be forced to declare sovereign default and join the swelling ranks of defunct nations. There will be a mad shuffle to find safe havens for hot money, but none will be found. Investors around the world will finally be forced to realize that the best way to avoid losses is to not have any money to start with. Despite their best efforts to diversify their holdings, investors will find that they are all long paper, be it stocks, bonds, deeds, promissory notes, or incomprehensible derivative contracts. They will also find that, in the new business climate, none of these instruments make particularly formidable weapons: as the friendly game of rock-paper-scissors turns hostile, they will discover that rocks stave in skulls, that scissors puncture vital organs, but that the paper, even when wielded expertly, just causes paper cuts. Those formerly well-heeled persons who tend to believe that "possession is nine-tenths of the law" will find many extralegal exorcists eager to liberate their demons. In particular, organized crime rings will start using data mining software to identify lightly guarded cabins and compounds in Montana and other remote locations that are well-stocked with canned food, weapons and gold and silver bullion, and start harvesting them by softening the target with mortars, rockets and aerial bombardment, then sending in commando teams with grenades and machine guns. Once the harvest is in, they will expatriate the proceeds using the diplomatic pouches of defunct nations held in their sway.

While the bullion is expatriated, the Pentagon will attempt to repatriate troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and the numerous US military bases around the world, soon finding that they lack the wherewithal to do so, stranding the troops wherever they are, and forcing them to resupply themselves. Military families will be invited to donate food, uniforms, clean underwear and toiletries for their loved ones overseas. American weaponry will flood the black market, driving down prices. Some servicemen will decide that returning to the US is a bad idea in any case, and go native, marrying local women and adopting local religions, customs and garb. Although national leaders will continue to prattle on about national security whenever there is a microphone pointed at them, their own personal security will become their overarching concern. Officials at all levels will attempt to assemble ever larger retinues of bodyguards and security consultants. Members of Congress will become ever more reticent and will avoid encountering their constituents as much as possible, preferring to hide in Washington's hermetically sealed high-rises, walled compounds and gated communities. Meanwhile, outside the official security perimeter, a new neighborliness will take root, as squatting becomes known as "settling in," trespassing as "beating a new path," and fences, walls and locks are everywhere replaced by watchful eyes, attentive ears and helping hands.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

As we approach the end of a year, and the end of a decade, it is a good time to draw some conclusions and think about the future... of the blog you are currently reading. I started it a few years ago, as part of an effort to promote a book I was writing. That went quite well, and in the process I built a small but enthusiastic audience of people who clamored for more.

They tended to be forward-looking, independent-thinking types who couldn't help but see that an American collapse was coming and were quite worried by this prospect. I was able to ease their minds, from several directions. Based on my first-hand observations of the Soviet collapse, I was able to add a lot of mundane detail, which is helpful in developing a realistic picture of the future and forming reasonable expectations. But perhaps more importantly, I was able to do so with a sense of humor. I find that a sense of humor is absolutely indispensable for preserving one's sanity. Furthermore, I feel that people who lack a sense of humor tend to be dreary, awful company, risky to have around, and a potential mental health hazard. (By the way, according to such people, that's not funny.)

To me, dead-serious people have always seemed much more dead than serious. Humor is not just about taking the edge off: most interesting critical thinking seems to happen at the cusp between seriousness and humorousness. Judging the serious and humorous aspects of each statement allows us to become cognizant of the expressive limitations of contemporary language and the imbecilic clichés with which it is riddled, and liberates us somewhat from conventional modes of thought. But what can be a benefit can also be a limitation: I find it hard to adequately express myself without recourse to parody, satire, absurdity, double entendres, gallows humor, irony or sarcasm. These are all arrows in my quiver, and I never go hunting without them. But humor, as it turns out, has its limits.

Over just the past year, based on the numerous blog comments and emails I have received, I could see the mood of the audience shift. First, the audience got much larger: collapse has gone mainstream. Second, the mood went from light-hearted and humorous to earnest, to serious, to concerned, to angry. This is, of course, perfectly understandable. Over the course of the past year, it has become clear that Obama is just the next political fraud-in-chief, that national bankruptcy is unavoidable, that economic recovery is a pipe dream, that Washington and Wall Street have congealed into a single kleptocratic monolyth impervious to popular influences, that Pax Americana is at an end throughout the world, and that if you aren't absolutely certain that you are high-class, then you must be low-class like the rest of us, because the middle class ain't no more. Funny, isn't it, the difference just one year makes?

I was lucky, because when I started writing about the collapse of the USA, it was still an arrogant, self-assertive, self-satisfied country that believed in its full-spectrum dominance and thought it was heading for a "new American century." In short, it was a country that could still take a joke rather than being one. What before seemed witty is now perceived as a mockery or an insult. Not only is it impossible to joke away pain, grief and despair, but attempts to do so are in rather questionable taste, and that, more than anything else, gives me pause, because if there is anything I detest more than humorlessness, it's mauvais goût.

And so, the time has come to make some changes. Henceforth, this blog will be for publishing perfectly serious articles about climate effects on the shoreline, sail-based transport, and my next book.

Saturday, December 05, 2009

[Late yesterday I killed this post, along with the previous one, because comment moderation got to be too much of a chore. The fellow depicted here has a lot of cousins, and they all have internet access. Then quite a few people wrote to me to ask me to bring it back. As a compromise, I am bringing back just this post.]

As some of you might have guessed by now, the topic of climate change is very important to me. I believe that all sorts of people should be made aware of climate change in ways that will make it very important to them as well. By "all sorts" I mean not just the intelligent, educated people with an ability to understand what a "climate model" is, but the sort of people you can see exhibited here.

I spent a year working in advertising, and have gained some understanding of what sort of ammunition it takes to make such people absorb and respond to a message. Significantly, it does not involve making them think; for those unaccustomed to thought, it is uncomfortable, and making them uncomfortable tends to anger them.

Climate scientists and environmental activists who support them have been struggling to get their message across: that an increase in average global temperature of 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century is likely and would be a catastrophe.

Let's deconstruct this message on behalf of the person you see seated here. Starting at the end, there is this big scary Greek word. Tune that out: "cat... here, kitty-kitty!" Let's also cross out all the words he doesn't care about: "scientists," "average," "global" and "Celsius." These are all noise words. What we are left with is "It will be 6 degrees warmer." If he were wearing a sweatshirt, he might be prompted to think about taking it off, but as he is already down to just the boxers and the wife-beater, we shouldn't wish him to disrobe any further. If he succeeds in processing "by the end of the century," he would translate it as "not any time soon." If the word "likely" makes it through his cognitive filter, it would come out as "maybe." The message, as received, thus reads: "Maybe it will get a bit warmer long after I am dead. Well, whoop-tee-doo! What else is on TV?"

You may ask yourself, What difference does it make what this individual thinks? Well, it does and it doesn't. It doesn't because he has zero political or economic power or influence. It does because those who run the country in which he resides find it convenient to pretend that his opinion matters, to dumb down public discourse so as to frustrate the smart, educated people to the point of not wanting to participate, because dumb people are easier to exploit than smart people. If we want to influence public policy and try to prevent climate catastrophe (to the extent that it is still preventable) we need to have this fellow squarely on our side. This is not impossible by any means, but it is a dead certainty that scientific mumbo-jumbo won't make a convert of him.

The word "climate" is a bit of a non-starter already. He likes "climate control," and what we are telling him is that he might have to get a bigger air conditioner... by the end of the century. That's just great. But the real howler is the persistent use of the word "average." Imagine him poking his head out of his double-wide trailer home to surmise the weather, and, turning to his Spandex-clad, morbidly obese wife, exclaiming "Sweet Jesus, what an AVERAGE day! Take out your teeth, woman! Let's celebrate!" Are you beginning to get the picture?

Here is a mapping I would like to contribute to the question of how to sell climate change to the general public.

Scientific Mumbo-Jumbo

Translation

Global

1. Washington County2. Jefferson County3. Franklin County4. All the way over in Madison County5. Fabulous places you have only heard about but might want to visit when you win the lottery, like Orlando (not funny-sounding ones like Bangladesh: "Bang what?")

Warming

Screwed-up weather

Increased precipitation

Flood! Your double-wide will get washed into the ravine!

Average temperature increase

Heat waves! You'll be running you AC flat out and still sweating like a pig!

Atmospheric CO2 concentration

Burning stuff is screwing up the weather; everybody must stop burning so much stuff before it gets any worse.

Unlike the problem of stopping climate change, I see this communication problem as solvable. The issue, as I see it, is that nobody has really tried to solve it. The reasons for this are many and varied, but none of them is particularly good.

If combating climate change requires everyone to understand climate science, then the battle has already been lost. As our dumb luck would have it, that is not necessarily the case.

Monday, November 23, 2009

A few years ago I bought a sailboat from a fellow who I am sure wishes to remain unnamed, but who at the time made much of his boat restoration skills. He had made a number of alterations to the boat, some ambitious, some less so, while I was, at the time, quite inexperienced. In spite of my relative inexperience, I was already able to discern certain imperfections in the results of the seller's efforts. But I was very impressed with the boat itself (and the boat did turn out to be quite excellent) and so I chose to gloss over these slight imperfections in the seller's workmanship.

For such a large man, the seller had a very soft and gentle tone of voice. He did disclose some things along the way that should have alarmed me. I believe that the reason they didn't was because his tone of voice had a calming, soothing effect on me. For instance, he could have said something like "I ran out of caulk while installing this thing, so I mounted it on a slice of cheese from my lunchbox" and I probably would have thought "Mmm... cheese... lunch?" Also, the boat had recently returned from an extended ocean cruise, and the seller looked quite alive to me, leading me to think that none of these imperfections was life-threatening. And so I bought the boat.

As I already mentioned, it turned out to be an excellent boat, but I turned out to be overly nonchalant about the non-life-threatening nature of the seller's workmanship. During our shakeout cruise most things that could break did break, causing me to question many of the seller's practices and techniques. Is it proper to cut pieces out of random structural elements with a reciprocating saw in order to make room for one's head? (Apparently the seller was one or two inches taller than the boat's designer had considered it to be humanly possible.) Is a piece of Masonite an acceptable substitute when the manufacturer specifies that a block of hardwood should be used to mount the autopilot? Is it sufficiently safety-conscious to seal a disconnected through-hull by plugging it with a rubber stopper from the inside? The good part in all this was that I, in the process of tackling these questions, along with a multitude of similar ones, one by one or in combination, sometimes in circumstances when I had my hands full just sailing the boat, gained immeasurably in knowledge and in confidence.

Although confronting these questions one by one, sometimes in challenging circumstances, was an excellent (though sometimes unnerving) way to learn, eventually I realized that there was an important first question that I ought to ask of each thing on the boat: "Did the seller do it?" If he did it, then the next question would be, "What does it take it to rip out and replace it?" If it is neither very hard nor very expensive, then that is automatically the next step. If it is, then the third question becomes, "What's wrong with it?" If answering this question turns out to involve ripping it out and replacing it, then so be it, but leaving a stone unturned would not be conducive to either peace of mind or safety, because, although there are now very few of them left, I am yet to find A Thing He Did that does not have major issues.

To be fair, the seller did do one very good thing: he kept afloat and sold to me a very good boat. Also, I can't fault him for trying to maintain a boat on a shoestring (I actually have immense respect for people who are able to do that well). Whatever he does, and however he does it, it clearly works for him. I see him leaping about the wave-tossed spindrift-swept deck in the midst of a howling tempest juggling a hammer, a screwdriver and a soggy box of rusty drywall screws. Maybe he is happy, maybe he is sad, who knows...

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds." I agree, but I would go a step further and ardently wish that each and every little mind had such a hobgoblin to call its own. If someone's work is consistently excellent, that is better than sporadically excellent work. Although much excellent work can be undone by a single reputation-destroying, career-ending blunder, short of that, sporadic excellence is better than none at all. But if someone's work is more often than not of an abysmally ghastly quality and in general a monstrous travesty, then consistency can still be its one redeeming quality. If it is consistent, then one knows what to do with it, all of it, at once, and not waste any time trying to cherry-pick salvageable exceptions where none might exist.

Allow me to present an example. Suppose you are wondering whether a particular public institution has any particular merit that would serve to justify its continued existence. It might be the health care system, or national defense, or the tax code, or any number of other similar boondoggles. We might consider each institution in and of itself, apart from all the others, to see whether it is consistently bad, or whether it has some redeeming qualities. Or we might save ourselves a lot of time by asking ourselves just one simple question: "Is it Bolshevik?" Because if it is Bolshevik, then that tells us right away that it is just one element of a perfectly monstrous entity called the USSR. This particular monstrous entity is already defunct, and so there is no need for us to go out and slay it, but were it not, we would know immediately that none of its institutions are in need of reform, because what would be the point? Making a perfect monster into an imperfect monster does not seem like a worthy goal.

Allow me to present another example. Currently in the USA we now live surrounded by institutions that many of us readily concede are quite broken, but it still takes most of us considerable effort to declare any of them irredeemable. It is natural for us to look for redeeming qualities, to think that a certain negative outcome is the result of a mistake rather than the fullest possible expression of its true nature. It takes time and effort to collect enough evidence to be able to declare, based on a preponderance of evidence, that what we have here is something perfectly monstrous, and then to be ready to debate people who hold opposing viewpoints. Few of us are equipped to handle the task of outright condemnation. There are some experts whose job it is to condemn buildings, to decommission vessels, and to sentence people to death, and they sometimes have to exercise judgment, but mostly they just follow rules. And when there are no rules to follow, we are all helpless.

This is where monsters come in handy: we all know what we must do to them. Like so many things that bedevil our lives, they have a notional rather than a physical reality, but in spite of that the effect they have on our lives can be quite real. Take corporations: the term "corporation" is actually a clever misnomer, because a corporation is, in fact, incorporeal — lacking a body. It has many of the same rights as a person, but in place of a body it has a "corporate veil" which, once pierced, usually reveals some cringing nincompoop who screwed up the paperwork and is now personally liable for his corporation's debts and transgressions. Since a corporation has personhood but lacks a body, it is, in a technically precise way, a phantom. Like other kinds of monsters, it is immortal, and very specific steps must be followed in order to kill it. Now, not all phantoms are monsters, but I hope you will agree that the potential is there.

Just like us, monsters must follow certain rules. Vampires must drink human blood and stay out of the sun. Werewolves must turn into wolves and start mauling people at the sight of the full moon. Zombies must eat brains. Corporations must produce high share prices and dividends for their shareholders. This last one seems comparatively innocuous, but it is sufficiently abstract to make the transition between mere immortal phantomhood and complete monstrousness quite automatic, because usually there are both monstrous and non-monstrous ways to create value for shareholders, and the monstrous ways are often more profitable in the short run. Some corporations may not seem particularly monstrous at the moment, but given their monstrous propensities we can never let down our guard.

Monsters require different treatment from most other things out there. We don't generally try to reform them. There is hardly a point in teaching a vampire good hygiene (rinse between meals, please!) or in muzzling a werewolf and clipping its claws, or in making zombies eat a balanced diet and observe Lent. Rather, we generally prefer to slay them. There are specific ways to kill various monsters. A vampire is dispatched by driving an aspen stake through its heart. Werewolves are shot with silver bullets. Zombies require a shotgun blast to the head. Corporations dissolve upon being doused with red ink, a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Now, a question arises with regard to the USA: is it more of a country (like, say, France) or is it more of a corporation (like, say AIG or GM or GS)? Looking at its politics, it is apparent that it is more of a country club than a country. Corporations are clearly the ones in charge, through electoral campaign donations, lobbyists, and the revolving door between corporate and government positions. The periodic electoral monkey-business and fake media frenzy are just there as an ad campaign to keep the brand fresh. It does seem more and more like a corporate entity, with a small and shrinking number of shareholders, whose latest scheme (now that the whole thing is spiraling the drain) is to have the government print lots of money just so that they can pocket huge sums of it.

Just as a vampire must drink blood, the USA is compelled by its corporate nature to produce value for its shareholders, and the only way it can do so in a collapsing economy is by printing money. Monstrous, isn't it? So, how many more buckets of red ink will it take before we all get to hear "I'm dissolving! I'm dissolving!"? If you are not quite ready to hear that, then I recommend that you run home immediately, bar the door and get busy with the garlic and the crucifixes. Slaying monsters is not for everyone, you know.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Russian-born and now resident in the US, Dmitry Orlov has a theory that the United States is heading for collapse just as the Soviet Union did — and for the same reasons: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil, a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. He talks to Chris Laidlaw about what he calls ‘The Superpower Collapse Soup’.

At the end of the interview, I misspoke when Chris basically asked me whether I was pushing Green agenda (NZ Green party polls in the single digits). I should by now be used to interviewers' attempts to pigeonhole me and marginalize my opinions. What I should have said is this:

Any resemblance between what I might advocate and a political agenda (Green or otherwise) is purely coincidental. Green politics is still politics, and politics of any stripe has precious little to offer when it comes to surviving collapse. Politics is at best a distraction, and has the potential to make a bad situation much worse. In the aftermath of a collapse, politics can lead to civil war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. I am particularly opposed to the attempt to coerce people into a one-dimensional "political spectrum."

On the other hand, Phillip Adams of Radio Australia actually called me an anarchist (but was kind enough to cut that bit out of the program prior to broadcast). The NZ interview was broadcast live. Oh well.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Are you still talking about Cyclone Nargis? Have you ever heard of Cyclone Nargis? Here’s a reminder: on 1 May 2008 a weakening low-pressure system suddenly picked up energy as it approached Burma from the Bay of Bengal. By the second day of this rapid strengthening, Cyclone Nargis was blowing in excess of 135MPH and made landfall on the low-lying southern coast of Burma armed with vast reserves of cyclonic energy, a storm surge beneath, and constant heavy rain from above. The Irrawaddy Delta was devastated, causing at least 140,000 human deaths. Most of us have forgotten about it.

One reason you may have heard of Cyclone Nargis at the time, is that for a short while it was the cause of a major diplomatic incident, with the Burmese Junta refusing to accept aid and assistance from the West, while continuing with a meaningless referendum. Another reason you may have heard of Cyclone Nargis is because you live near to Burma; and there’s the rub – proximity is the single most important factor in deciding whether a story is newsworthy in the mainstream media, and until Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, devastating coastal flooding was just something that happened to “other people” as far as the vast majority of Americans were concerned.

That’s not going to change anytime soon – it’s partly down to our natural tendency for prioritising the local and the immediate, for survival reasons; but to a large extent it is also down to the cultural conditioning that exists in most civilisations in order to only value that which benefits the system that you are deemed to be part of. If you are American then that means that anything that doesn’t affect America, doesn’t matter. You can safely repeat that mantra for any civilised nation. It’s not necessarily good, but it’s true.

In Part I of this article, we examined the best available research, and, given the current best forecast of 2 metres and the consistent tendency of climate forecasters to undershoot their own subsequent observations, we concluded that a 4 metre sea level rise over the course of this century is quite likely.

In this part, we focus on two areas that are most familiar to the two authors, and also relevant to the majority of readers: Dmitry is going to look at the likely impact of future sea-level rise on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, not just in terms of the direct effects of flooding on habitation, but the many different indirect effects that sea-level rise will have; Keith is going to do the same for the east coast of England and the Netherlands, two places that have seen their fair share of flooding in the past, and are bound to suffer in the future.

The view from New England, by Dmitry Orlov

When it comes to addressing the effects of sea level rise that is expected to occur over the course of this century, there are many ways to immerse yourself in the subject. You might do some reading and make some field trips, talk to knowledgeable people, attend some seminars, and write some research papers. Or you might take an entire year to slowly traverse the landscape in question, and get a feel for it through a lot of direct observation, which is what I did. I spent about a year sailing around the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from the submerged coastal mountain range that is the coast of Maine north of Portland to the shifting sand dunes of St. Augustine in Florida, and most points in between, looking at both nature and historic sites along the way.

There certainly is nature to be found further inland, but rather few historic sites. It is very important to understand that, unlike the ancient and compact settlement patterns of Europe, and unlike its dense and active network of navigable rivers and canals, North America consists of a rather narrow but thickly settled coastal zone known as the Northeast Corridor, and the vast expanse of Wild West. Historically, the colonies survived through ocean trade. Until the advent of coal-fired railroads, the only parts of the interior that were economically viable were the ones that were within easy reach of a navigable waterway. Even then many inland settlers found grain to be too bulky for trade, and used it to make whiskey. The Erie Canal made Chicago a town rather than just a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The reason was simple: before the advent of railroads, it cost as much to transport cargo 30 or so miles overland as it did to ship it across the ocean. Until a railroad was built across Massachusetts, goods shipped from Chicago to Boston via the Erie Canal had to be loaded onto barges and floated down the Hudson River to New York, then transferred to schooners that took them up the coast.

It is also very important to understand that global trade is not, as one unfortunately often hears, only possible thanks to fossil fuels. Until the 1920s much of the shipping in Boston Harbour was by sail. Most of the ships were relatively small, with vast numbers of schooners of around 60 feet and crews of 10 or fewer. The age of container ships, bulk carriers, roll-on roll-offs (ROROs), and other monstrous oil-thirsty craft is quite recent, while the history of global trade is ancient, and proceeded in one of two ways: on foot (leading caravans of pack animals) or by sail. It is also important to note that coal never became competitive with sail in transporting bulk goods, and sail-based shipping persisted until the age of the marine diesel engine, which burns bunker fuel (a slightly upgraded crude oil). This substance will most likely no longer be available in the vast quantities required just a few decades from now, and certainly well before the end of the century. It seems plausible to think that the age of fossil fuels will end as it started, with oil giving way to coal, giving way to wind.

And so, in looking at the future of North America, it makes sense to examine historical settlement patterns and patterns of trade. Even after the powerful economic stimulant of fossil fuels is no longer flowing freely, the perennial choice will remain the same: make and ship trade goods, or remain backward and poor. The transportation options will once again be largely limited to the waterways, with the vast landlocked areas of North America becoming stagnant backwaters, unable to trade, and steadily depopulating. Many people look at the end of the fossil fuel age and envision a future that is much more local; and surely it will be, but what they do not envision is the effect of a radically altered transportation topology. The current tightly interconnected transportation mesh of rail links, highways, and airports will be gone; and in its place will arise a sparse, seasonal network favouring single modes of transport for each link (pack animal, river barge, or ocean sailboat), heavily weighted in favour of water transport, and even more heavily weighted in favour of sail. Transporting a few tons of cargo per crew member across the Atlantic will require a few weeks' worth of rations for the crew members and a bit of sailcloth for the ship, but the wind will still be free. Hauling the same amount of freight across the Appalachian mountain range, which runs the length of the Eastern Seaboard, would become something of an epic undertaking.

Looking, once again, at the historical settlement patterns along the Eastern Seaboard, it becomes clear that how prosperous and populous any given coastal settlement becomes has a lot to do with how good a harbour it has. The Carolinas present an excellent example of this: their climates and populations are broadly similar, yet North Carolina is poor while South Carolina is prosperous. The difference can be brought down to a single, overwhelming factor: South Carolina's Charleston Harbour. This is a splendid deep-water harbour, sheltered, with a wide inlet. North Carolina is dominated by Cape Hatteras, an area of shifting shoals and wide, shallow bays. To make matters worse, the Cape brings together the warm Gulf Stream, flowing north and turning east, with the terminus of the cold Labrador Current flowing south, and the mixture of the two creates a lot of unsettled weather. To make matters worse yet, it is within reach of tropical cyclones, which shift sand dunes, close and open ocean inlets, and play havoc with coastal communities that depend on access to the ocean. While Charleston Harbour is a major asset, Cape Hatteras is a world-class hazard to navigation. And so South Carolina grew rich by importing African slaves and exporting rice, indigo, and cotton through Charleston Harbour; while North Carolina, with its many shoals and few and treacherous navigable ocean inlets, developed no major towns and subsisted largely through fishing.

I've looked closely at many of the successful port towns, large and small, along the Eastern Seaboard: Portland, Newburyport, Salem, Boston, Newport, New York, Charleston, and St. Augustine, plus a few others. All of these have accumulated centuries of history, much of it connected with the sea and, hence, with faraway peoples and places, and this makes them major tourist destinations. The quality of the harbour, it turns out, had much to do with the relative success of a port: Boston's excellent harbour, with a wide channel and ample anchorages with good holding ground in the lee of a good set of sheltering harbour islands, allowed Boston to compete with New York in transatlantic trade. But beyond geological luck, something else stands out: the quality of the transition between water and land. In every good port there are dredged and marked approaches to piers and jetties, good seawalls high enough to keep out most storm surges, and dry land beyond, which is solid and graded flat. Over its long history as a port town, a hilly town, such as Portland, Boston, or New York, slowly grows an apron of land that is just high enough to be out of reach of most waves. Although some of these shoreline reinforcements are the result of ambitious projects (the cut-stone embankment in Newburyport is a good example), many of them are the result of a slow process of accretion by generations of people plying maritime trades, adjusting the shoreline to different uses by floating in and dumping rip-rap and solid fill, building seawalls, jetties and piers, seeing them pruned back by storms, and learning their lessons. Just how close to the margin these old structures already are became apparent to me last summer: during high tide, and thanks to the extra two feet of water we got for no adequately understood reason, some of the older, abandoned piers in Salem, Massachusetts were awash.

Most of these structures have been designed with hundred-year floods in mind, presumably because having to rebuild them every century or so is not such a bad thing. But then, given the expected ocean level rise, every hundred years will become every 10, then every year, and then every neap tide, then every high tide when there is an easterly wind, and then permanently awash at high tide. Who would be up to the thankless task of piling up more rocks and driving in more pilings, just to see them washed away a decade or so later? A related problem is the silting up of channels caused by accelerated erosion. Once waves can reach a stretch of land that hitherto only had to contend with rainwater and snow melt, it often dissolves catastrophically, and what was for centuries a waterside pasture or marshland protected by a bit of rock is transformed within a season or two into a gradually sloping mud flat. The mud then gets scoured out by each tide and settles in the deepest spots, which are the navigation channels. At what point everyone will decide that all of this very temporary shoring up and dredging is just too much work is entirely unclear, but it seems likely that enough other problems will occur at the same time to make the question moot. As we prepare to say "hello" to the rising waters, we should also prepare to bid "adieu" to deep-draught dockage.

What other problems might we have? The United States Environmental Protection Agency was nice enough to publish some approximate maps, colour-coding the results of an ocean level rise of up to 1.5m as red and up to 3.5m as blue for the entire Atlantic coast of North America. Since I am particularly well-acquainted with Boston, that part of their map drew my attention first. The resolution is not very high, but sometimes precision is superfluous. If you expect to find yourself standing on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue in 2050, should you expect the water be up to your navel, your nipples, or your eyeballs? Certainly, this would not be the map to consult on that particular occasion, but then would that be a time to consult a map at all? Broad brushstrokes are perfectly fine for the purposes of this discussion, just as a wrecking ball need not be swung with any great precision.

But to start with, here is a neat and tidy map of Boston within its current shoreline. Entering Boston Harbour from the Atlantic, we pass between Deer Island with its sewage treatment plant on the right and Long Island on the left. We proceed down the main channel into the inner harbour, passing between City Point on our left and Logan International Airport on our right. Past that, on our left we find the port of South Boston, which handles container ships, and the World Trade Centre, where cruise ships dock, while on our right is East Boston with its one remaining shipyard and marina, but where once the mighty clipper ships for the China tea trade were built. Further down the channel, we round the downtown with its skyscraper-studded financial district on our left. To our right is Mystic River, which has a liquefied natural gas tanker terminal, a dock for scrap iron barges, and a car ferry port. Turning further left, we pass Charlestown Navy Yard and the Charles River Dam (which should have properly been called the Charles River Pumping Station). Beyond is the Charles River Basin, ringed by lovely waterside parks, which, on good days and bad, are full of bicyclists and joggers. The river itself is also normally quite full of sailing dinghies, rowing sculls, canoes, and kayaks. Three large universities — Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Boston University — are located right on the river, and each has a boathouse. (Northeastern University is landlocked, but has a boathouse nevertheless.)

Before the Charles River Dam was built, Charles River was brackish and tidal, and smelled rather bad. The pumping station houses several large diesel engines that drive turbines that pump down the river during high tides and heavy rains, to prevent the river from leaving its banks. I have spent a year or so living at a marina directly downstream of the dam, and have observed that the pumping station does not run very often, but when it does it is quite an impressive sight. The tidal range is about 3 metres, and so with a 1.5-metre rise it would have to be running over half of the time, a 3m rise would force it to run continuously, and a 4m rise would likely put it underwater for good.

And here is the map prepared by our friends at the EPA. What's red goes under at 1.5 metres rise, what's blue goes under at 3.5m rise, tan is either dry or uncovers at low tide at 3.5 metres rise (distinction not shown), and light blue is currently water. As we enter the harbour, Deer Island on our right is now again an island because the dam connecting it to the town of Winthrop is gone, as is much of Winthrop. Long Island, the barrier island on our left, is mostly washed out as well. Logan International Airport still has its control tower above water, but now only caters to sea planes. Port of South Boston and World Trade Centre are no more; same with East Boston's shipyard facilities. Downtown stands as an island, but is rather hard to reach because all the highway tunnels are underwater, as are the docks. Mystic River facilities are gone as well. Charles River Dam is out of commission, and Charles River Basin is once again brackish and tidal all the way upstream to Watertown (off the map to the left), so-called because it has another, smaller dam, and supplied all of Boston's water before an aqueduct was built to a reservoir quite far away. Prior to closing their doors, MIT, Harvard, and Boston University have spent the remainder of their rapidly dwindling endowments on dikes, dams, and pumping stations, to no avail.

To be perfectly candid, looking at this map does not fill me with optimism for the future of our fair City on a Hill. It seems that in due course it will turn into a landscape studded with abandoned wrecks of buildings standing knee-deep in a swirling colloidal suspension of excrement and garbage. What are the chances of preserving road access, or the electric grid, or water and sewer services under such conditions? And is it worth anyone's trouble to even try, if it is understood that another decade will bring another few centimetres of ocean level rise, and that in response the shoreline will move a few kilometres further inland? Would it not be wiser to abandon entire areas as the water comes in, understanding that once it is in, it is there to stay?

But that leaves open an important question: What about Boston as a port? The same question applies to any other port, or, for that matter, just about any stretch of shoreline, for, as we will see in Part III, Boston's case is quite typical. Suppose you are a planter, happily growing wheat close enough to the coast to walk it down to the waterline with the help of some mules, and you would like to exchange that wheat (baked into hard biscuits and packed in waterproof tins) with some sailors in exchange for a few bottles of wine, some chocolate, and some silk cloth for a bridal gown (life goes on, you know). You pack the tins in panniers, strap the panniers onto your mules, and walk in stately procession toward the coast (mules aren't exactly swift animals, and 1 mile per hour is what they generally peg out at). With port facilities permanently submerged, where do you intersect with your sailor friends to effect the exchange?

Things are not as hopeless as they would seem. After all, we did manage to colonise the entire planet using sailboats and without any port facilities to start with. A variety of techniques, some ancient, some decidedly twenty-first century, can be brought to bear to solve this problem. The problem most people face in adapting to the rapidly transforming landscape is not technical but psychological: they will insist on attempting to run their existing systems until they crash, simply because they have so much invested in them. This will mean that most people will simply deal themselves out of the game, and that the volume of global trade will diminish, perhaps by several orders of magnitude. But it will not stop altogether, and may eventually recover somewhat.

In The European Lowlands by Keith Farnish

Walking the grassy embankment between the tidal River Orford and the dusty fields of East Suffolk, it becomes starkly clear what sea level rise would mean to this part of the English coast. As I walk northwards the brackish water laps the broken-down concrete sills and oozes through the cracks, eroding away silt from the dike that I am striding along. Marsh Samphire seems to glow in the October sun; a tasty treat, but rare enough to be a delicacy in these parts. To my left, a cloud of dust is whipped up by the breeze, helped on its way by the harrows of a tractor: it’s been a dry month, and the frail earth is easily moved by the action of the wind. Weak, exhausted soil; the result of decades of relentless tillage in a land that is dependent upon constant drainage via a highly complex system of ditches and waterways.

The land here may be flat and low, but there is enough height on Orford Ness to mean that I can’t make out the North Sea, even from the top of this dike. But I can hear it as it washes through the stones that make up this ephemeral spur of land and then pulls back, moving the shingle in eddies down the coast. Farmland to my left; seas to my right – what must the people who live here think?

Constant dread, would be one expectation; but somehow I don’t think that is the case. If we make our way 100 miles north-west to the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, then we experience a world of sea-level denial:

The Middle Level is the central and largest section of the Great Level of the Fens, reclaimed by drainage during the mid-17th Century.

Its river system consists of over 120 miles (190 kilometres) of watercourses most of which are also navigations and has a catchment of just over 170,000 acres (70,000 hectares).

The efficient operation of the system is vital to the safety and prosperity of over 100,000 people who live and work in the area. But for the operations of the Commissioners and boards, much of the fen land would be under water for much of the year, accesses from higher ground would be cut-off and many of the present land uses, which are taken for granted, would be impossible.

Stern warnings indeed, but calmed by the claims of the Middle Level Commission; something we also see for another of the large Internal Drainage Boards (IBDs), that of South Holland, a 95,000 acre part of Lincolnshire, which states: "Although the entire area is at considerable theoretical risk of river flooding and inundation from the sea, the actual risk is substantially reduced by the work that we do in partnership with Local Authorities, the Environment Agency and Natural England."

Everything will be fine if they do their job? There is a clue in the word “fine”, as the balancing act between inundation and successful drainage rests on the finest of lines; something you can easily see if you enter a very conservative 2 metre sea level rise into the Firetree global flood map:

That’s the Fenlands gone, then, in all practical sense. Plug in something approaching the more dramatic scenarios discussed in Part One of this series, and you see what can only be described as an entirely new landscape: a 5 metre rise creates a larger North Sea, extending southwards to Cambridge, and taking a five mile slice off the Lincolnshire coast. No more holidays in Skegness and, probably more significantly, about 10 Gigawatts of electricity generation capability (about 15% of the UK total) is at or below sea level. That’s just in one particular part of England; on a larger scale, given the propensity for nuclear power stations to be on the coast and coal-fired power stations to be near rivers (for cooling water), a five metre rise in sea level would pretty much have the UK’s power supply bollixed. You won’t see that in any official reports.

Back to the fertile croplands of the Fens, and neither will you see this startling fact mentioned: the pumping station at St Germans, two miles south-west of Kings Lynn, is just about the only thing preventing the aforementioned 170,000 acres of Fenland (the Middle Level) from flooding, even without sea-level rise. It would only take a power failure during a heavy period of rain or a high spring tide, with the sluice gates down, to quickly engulf the area. With a 5 metre rise, the new state-of-the-art system – due to be completed in 2010 – will be underwater all the time. With a storm surge, like that experienced in 1953, a mere two metre rise should suffice to flood the whole of the Middle Level, with the St Germans pumping station sputtering to an ungainly halt. If you want to see the one thing that lies between safety and the flooding of 265 square miles of land, click on this link. Comforting, isn’t it?

Do you know what it would mean to bring marshland back to the East of England on the kind of scale envisaged with just a modest sea-level rise? Not only will the land become unstable for the majority of buildings currently in the area, and totally incapable of supporting agriculture of any kind beyond sheep grazing; the Fenlands, the Broads, and the East Suffolk, Essex and Kent coasts will experience the unwelcome return of malaria. Malaria in the UK; something that up until the urgent Canutian shoring up of the coast in the 19 c. was tolerated as an occupational hazard by the few who lived there, but would be a scourge upon modern towns and cities. As MJ Dobson writes, in a sobering paper on the incidence of malaria in England:

On every count, the marshland populations recorded the highest adult and child mortality rates. Average crude death rates were as high as 60, 70 or 80 per 1000 — levels which could be two to three times those of neighbouring non-marshland parishes. Life expectancy at birth was little more than 30 years for the sickly marshland residents and nearly half of all recorded deaths occurred at age 10 years or below. Burial patterns from year to year and season to season were also extremely volatile in the marshes and there was a very close correspondence between fluctuations in summer temperatures and the level of mortality in the autumn and following spring. The hottest summers were always followed by the unhealthiest and most mortal times in the marshlands.

A marshy land experiencing rising temperatures: this could be any coastal region in the world, coming to a time near you.

Dutch Denial

Never underestimate the Dutch: apart from being a race of phenomenally linguistic people who have found an almost perfect social balance between freedom and responsibility, at least compared to the rest of the civilised world, they also manage to keep a level head when a fifth of the Netherlands is only inhabitable by humans because of thousands of miles of dikes.

I suppose when you have to squint far into the past to see the deadliest of floods experienced by your people, knowing that in the last 100 years only one flood event has taken a significant number of lives, then a feeling of safety is bound to embrace you to a certain extent. But what if you do peer back?

1717 is regarded as the year of the last great flood in the Netherlands; the Christmas Flood which is estimated to have led to the deaths of 14,000 people in a single night. Return to 1570, and the All Saints flood is said to have taken many thousands of lives. Similarly in 1530, 1421, 1404, 1287... St Lucia’s Flood in 1287 washed away between 50 and 80 thousand rural lives in the low-lying central plains of Holland. Back and back, a pattern of death that should serve to haunt the cultural memories of the Dutch – it really should, regardless of how safe things may feel at the moment:

Of all the United Provinces, Frieseland and Groningen have suffered, and continue to suffer, most from these floods. Exposed to the full rage of the north, north-west, and west winds, the waters of the angry Atlantic and Polar seas rush towards these provinces, pour through the inlets of its barrier reef – the Helder, (Hels-deur – hell’s door) the Vlie, and the more northern gates – heap them up in the inland Zuyder Zee, burst or overtop its dykes, and spread themselves over the country, sometimes to the very borders of Hanover. Thousands of men and cattle perish, the gates of the barriers become widened, and the dominion of the inland sea enlarged.

This paragraph, from E. and R. Littell’s “Living Age” (1848) predates any major engineering works, apart from the piecemeal implementation of thousands of local dikes, which were only ever meant to provide temporary respite from flooding. A remarkable plan, albeit primarily motivated by the desire for more farmland and population space, appeared in Modern Mechanix in 1930 (courtesy of the Strange Maps Blog), proposing the construction of a 450 mile long, 30 metre high wall across the central North Sea, with another slightly smaller one curving every which way to block off the southern end.

Absurdly impractical, as well as ecologically and politically ruinous, perhaps; but the construction of the Afsluitdijk (literally “Closure Dike”) across the mouth of the 2,000 square mile Zuiderzee between 1927 and 1933, was certainly close to the limits of engineering in that period, and is still the largest single land “reclamation” project ever completed. The word “reclamation” is quoted intentionally, for what exactly is “reclaimed” when the oceans are banished from a place where they once existed?

This assertiveness, the almost messianic approach to claiming for a nation what was never its property, is foolhardy at best, and pathological at worst. What was once ocean can never truly be land unless the cycles of the climate deem it to be so – and we are undoubtedly taking them in the opposite direction. If we wilfully claim ascendancy over the incumbent waters, as the Dutch and the British have done over the last 800 years or so in their respective lowlands, then eventually the mindset that dominates is one of impregnability.

But the waters will return, not only to the coastline of eastern England as the sluice gates fail, but also to overtop the Afsluitdijk which is just 7 metres high. Remember back in Part One, when the 1953 flood reached 4.55 metres above the Normal Amsterdam Water Level? Well, the risk is increasing all the time; not only as the sea level rises, but as the energy in the oceans increases and – something that is the epitome of risk – the population grows inexorably. The denial culture that blossoms behind coastal defences is alive and well in the Netherlands, according to Maaskant, Jonkman and Bouwer:

The projected population growth in flood prone areas is higher than the average in the Netherlands between 2000 and 2040. Due to this effect the potential number of fatalities is projected to increase by 68% on average for 10 different flood scenarios, not including impacts from climate change and sea level rise. Just sea level rise of 0.30 m leads to an average 20% increase in the number of fatalities. The combined impact of sea level rise and population growth leads to an estimated doubling in the potential number of fatalities. Taking into account increasing probability of flooding due to sea level rise and extreme river discharges, the expected number of fatalities could quadruple by 2040.

(“Future risk of flooding: an analysis of changes in potential loss of life in South Holland”, Environmental Science & Policy, 2009)

“Reclaimed land” is an anachronism because you cannot reclaim what you never had – the sea will reclaim the land soon; sooner than you can imagine.

* * *

For a while yet, coastal destruction caused by sea level rise will be seen as something that happens to someone else, somewhere else (or to you, but then that's just your bad luck). Social inertia will follow its usual course, causing people to insure themselves against fires and other minor accidents, sweat the little details of public health and safety, fight terrorism, while steadfastly ignoring the elephant in the room that is about to sit down on their heads. At what point will it become obvious to just about everyone that the gods saw their plans, laughed at them, and then cancelled them? Will it then be too late to do anything to prepare, or will those near the coast simply join the ranks of environmental migrants? And if you do start taking steps to prepare now, will you be viewed as a harmless eccentric, an alarmist crackpot, or a dangerous subversive?

In response to these questions, we are sure to hear a chorus of "Gloom and doom!" Ah, the "doomers" and the doomed, what beautiful music they make! Be that as it may; In Part III of this series, we will leave questions of denial and social inertia and political climate nonsense behind, and concentrate on What Might Work.

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Today the Wall Street Journal ran an interview with Mike Ruppert (who got me started by publishing my first article on his site, From The Wilderness). It is a sympathetic article, in which the subject of the imminent, inevitable collapse of industrial civilization is afforded a calm and thoughtful treatment.

Feed that to your donkey!

[Watch the trailer for the film "Collapse" which features Mike, and which, not coincidentally, opens tomorrow.]

Sunday, November 01, 2009

When I published the previous article about the ever-more-dire forecasts of ocean level rise, little did I know that I was blundering into the midst of a "climate change debate." But then many readers reacted to this article by making comments to the effect that "climate change is a hoax" or that I am "just like Al Gore." Since that article reviews and attempts to interpret of some of the most authoritative, conservative and consensus-based scientific reports available, it should not have given rise to any controversy at all.

A potentially controversial part of the article relates to its highlighting the fact that consensus estimates exclude certain categories of risk, which may be quite severe but are at present poorly understood. Given this high level of uncertainty, the scientists are being cautious in incorporating them in their estimates. This is understandable: a physician would no doubt think twice before telling a patient that she has anywhere between 3 months and 30 years left. On the other hand, if your doctor tells you that you are about to die... sometime, then you would be within your rights to seek a second opinion. But few people raised objections based on that.

I feel that discussion of climate change need not become mired in controversy. The controversy results from the fact that an attempt is being made to package and sell climate change as part of a political process: "Catastrophic climate change will result unless we curtail harmful industrial activity." This is the idea behind various international initiatives to limit greenhouse gas emissions, such as Kyoto and now Copenhagen. Scientific data goes in one end, enlightened policy comes out the other, and Nobel prises are handed out. The public at large is polarised into those who clap and cheer and say "The sooner the better!" and those who shake their heads or hurl invectives. There are also a few thoughtful individuals who variously think that international climate change legislation is the work of the Illuminati who are creating a world government, that the topic of climate change can best be tackled by studying sunspot activity while leaving the rest up to the miraculous workings of the free market, and that carbon dioxide does not cause a greenhouse effect but is simply the stuff makes champagne so delightfully bubbly (the latter proposition does require more research; please send along samples for me to test).

Consider, however, the following allegory. Imagine that I am walking along a mountain ridge, while in a swank châlet in the valley below some scientists, politicians and progressive industrialists are meeting, discussing climate change mitigation while drinking Glüwein and sampling amusing local cheeses and sausages. And then I, inadvertently (for I would never do such a thing on purpose!) dislodge a boulder. The boulder goes hurtling off the ridge and down the boulder-strewn slope, dislodging other boulders, and soon there is an avalanche of boulders, all following unpredictable paths as boulders are wont to do, but some clearly aiming for the châlet full of scientists and politicians. Alarmed by the approaching tumult, the scientists whip out their binoculars and their laptop computers, do a bit of plotting, and declare with great confidence: "This avalanche is being caused by DmitryOrlov dislodging boulders from the ridge above and it is very likely that this châlet will be destroyed as a result!" And then the politicians decide to act on this authoritative, rigorously researched, consensus-based report, and propose an immediate forced evacuation of the châlet. They also sign an international treaty making it illegal for DmitryOrlov to dislodge any more boulders from the ridge above said châlet. I, of course, do desist from dislodging any more boulders (wasn't going to anyway). The avalanche somehow magically misses the châlet, leaving it completely intact, and tumbling harmlessly into a ravine. The scientists and the politicians all die in any case, because, you see, the Glüwein they were drinking was contaminated with something lethal. Later on, the swank châlet is destroyed by an asteroid.

Confused? Sometimes a good way to clarify a point of confusion is to introduce a new term. Allow me to add a word to your vocabulary: "anthropoclastic," consisting of "anthropo-" (from Gr. anthropos, man) and "-clastic (from Gr. klastos, broken into pieces). It's a very proper-sounding yet virtually unused term. "Anthropoclastic climate change" is reminiscent of "anthropogenic climate change," which is a theory that climate change is being triggered by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), agriculture (through deforestation, bovine flatus and so on), cement manufacturing, leaking or flaring gas into the atmosphere, chemical manufacturing... the list is very long. Anthropogenic climate change is the theory that these human activities are highly disruptive of the climate. Anthropoclastic climate change is the theory that a highly disrupted climate, which is what we already have, is highly disruptive of human activities, and, in consequence, highly destructive of human life. The anthropogenic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at man, while the anthropoclastic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at nature. I will leave it up to you to decide which of the two gestures is the the most futile, but, futile gestures aside, I believe that there are steps to be taken to let us survive climate change, and that these steps should be given due consideration before too long.

I hope that focusing specifically on the anthropoclastic dimensions of climate change will eliminate most of the fruitless debate or political nonsense that clouds so many minds, because climate change per se is something we can all observe first-hand. Some of the particularly compelling bits of evidence require a trip to an exotic locale, such as the arctic tundra, the glaciers in Greenland, the Antarctic ice shelves or the ocean above the Arctic Circle, and since not all of us can make such a trip, or have the prior experience and knowledge to interpret what we would see there, we have to trust the observations of others. Take, for instance, what David Barber, Canada’s Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, said to the Canadian Parliament on the disappearance of the arctic ice pack that had persisted for tens of thousands of years: "We are almost out of multi-year ice in the northern hemisphere... I’ve never seen anything like this in my 30 years of working in the high Arctic... From a practical perspective, we almost have a seasonally ice-free Arctic now.”

Those who are loathe to trust the testimony of experts and prefer to only trust their own eyes can see for themselves. To be able to make your own observations, it would help for you to be one of the old people who have lived in one place their entire life, deriving some part of their sustenance and inspiration from the natural world that surrounds them, and are thus forced to pay attention to it. Short of that, some of your evidence would have to be second-hand: you could find a few people like that, and ask them if they've seen any big changes as far as the weather and such, trees and animals and so forth. If it looks to them as if you are really willing to listen, you will walk away with an earful, believe me! All around the world, but especially far north, we have, at the very least, entered a long period freak weather.

In case it helps, I will share with you some of my own observations. I grew up on the Gulf of Finland in Russia, which is occupied Finnish territory. Before the Revolution the Finns were part of the Russian Empire, and sometime after they became independent they allied with Nazi Germany and started arming themselves against Russia. Then Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and shortly thereafter the Soviet Union invaded Finland and reconquered Karelia (Kariela), Finland's easternmost province. I grew up in Kuokkala; the neighbouring town was Kilomäki, but once the Russians switched the signs at the railroad stations, few people besides my grandparents seemed to remember what they were.

In spite of the expulsion of the Finns, growing up in Karelia exposed me to Finnish cross-country ski culture at an early age. The per capita count of skis per household was quite ridiculously high. Attics were packed full of old wooden skis, and an entire branch of science was devoted to ways of waxing them. After I conquered all of the local hills, and the maze of cross-country trails that fanned out throughout the neighbouring forests (sometimes I was towed by a large and disobedient family dog) I ventured out onto the Gulf, all the way out to the shipping lane kept clear by icebreakers, and back to terrafirma.

One winter a huge storm blew up and toppled many layers of thick ice floes onto the beach. It didn't completely melt until mid-summer, and we had to climb over the ice barefoot to go wading across clean yellow sand to swim in fresh, cold, crystal-clear pale blue water. A few years after that my family moved away, and twenty years later, when I came back to visit my childhood haunts, the formerly pristine waterline wore a thick coat of rotting algae, the water was tepid and murky, and wading in it wasn't advised due to the risk of catching hepatitis, Giardia and an assortment of intestinal parasites.

The Gulf of Finland still freezes, and in 2003 it froze solid, to a depth of 80 centimetres (2.6 feet) but for many other bodies of water the ice has become unreliable. One of my Finnish friends grew up in Vermont (a small mountainous province that borders Canada) where he used to drive a laden van across the ice of Lake Champlain, navigating by shore lights. He tells me that by mid-winter the ice used to be thick, smooth, solid, and blown free of snow. If you try making that passage today, you are more than likely to drown. The following chart tells the story in numbers: it shows the number of years per decade that the lake froze over by a given month [source].

If strangely warm winters have become the norm, what about the summers? Last summer, while living on a sailboat in the middle Salem Harbour, Massachusetts, I decided to scrub my (boat's) bottom. And so I donned a snorkel, fins and the obligatory Speedos, grabbed a brush and jumped overboard. I emerged almost an hour later, not the least bit chilled, but encrusted with tiny shrimp which took quite some time to pick off. New England coastal waters are not supposed to be this tepid. Nor was I the only one who noticed the change. Salem News had this to say about it: "In July, ocean surface temperatures reached the highest ever recorded during that month, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. NOAA began keeping records in 1880... The average global water temperature in July is around 63 degrees [F, 17.2C], according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Centre in Asheville, [North Carolina]. On Tuesday, the ocean temperature at the buoy closest to Beverly and Salem was nearly 73 degrees [F, 22.2C] according to the NOAA Web site."

Thus, you don't have to think that humans caused climate change, or that humans can stop climate change before it is too late, but my feeling is that either you will agree that strange and dramatic climatic changes are afoot, or you just haven't done your homework. On this issue, I just don't see that there is any room for legitimate debate. The evidence is in.

It is also not controversial that the unusual climactic conditions are affecting the ability of farmers to grow food. I don't have to look too far to find examples: in New England, where I live, farmers are receiving federal disaster aid, because they lost over half of their crop. According to the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which petitioned for federal relief, "rain was 148 percent above normal in June, which was also the sixth coolest June on record in both Boston and Worcester, and likely the second cloudiest June on record since 1885. In July, rainfall was 200 percent above normal, with corresponding lower temperatures." "Corn growers in Norfolk County saw 83 percent of the value of their crop destroyed. In Essex County, strawberry growers could not bring more than 35 percent of their crop to market" reported the Boston Globe.

New England is by no means a unique case; everywhere you look, agriculture is under assault from the shifting climate. The barrage of strange weather makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to decide what to plant and when and where to plant it. According to the paleoclimatologist J.P. Steffensen, the stable climate that has prevailed during the previous 10,000 years is what made agriculture possible:

You can ask, Why didn't human beings make civilisation fifty thousand years ago? You know that they had just as big brains as we have today. When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, "Well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginning of a culture they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial — ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilisations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago it would have started then. But they had no chance.

Steffensen is a neo-catastrophist — a climatologist who believes in abrupt, catastrophic climate shifts. So is just about every other climatologist. They base their belief not on some exotic theory or complex computer model; in fact, they are often at a loss to explain the underlying mechanisms. Instead, they simply cannot disregard the overwhelming empirical evidence they have collected. Still, even after listening to a neo-catastrophist tell it like it is, I find no reason to think that agriculture will fail everywhere at once, and result in instant mass starvation. It seems more likely that, as agriculture becomes less and less reliable, malnutrition will become chronic in many places, resulting in high death rates, low birth rates and high childhood mortality, and an overall dwindling of the population over several generations.

Anthropoclastic climate change does not have to be a catastrophe, but it can be made catastrophic by clinging on to a failing agricultural model of food production. If we insist that farmers produce monoculture cash crops on the industrial model, we shall surely all starve. But if instead people make a concerted effort to reclaim the entire landscape, both rural and urban, for informal food production, growing edible plant species on former golf courses, parking lots, cemeteries, town greens, suburban back yards, urban rooftops and balconies, and front lawns of stately homes, then it seems quite likely that, no matter which way the climate lurches in a given year, something somewhere will be bearing fruit, enough to make it to the next season.

Wild foods can make a difference as well. Last summer, the forests of New England were full of berries that went unpicked. We did not pick any berries this year, but we did get a chance to pick some wild mushrooms, which had a fine year. As I write this, garlands of wild mushrooms are drying in our hallway. Man doth not live by mushrooms alone, but it's a start. And start we should, the sooner the better, but certainly before the shelves in the shops are bare, and so are the ones in your pantry. Mitigating anthropoclastic climate change will not be up to the politicians or the scientists or the industrialists, it will be up to me and to you.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

This article is the first part of a three-part series, which considers the effect of global warming on ocean level rise, and examines life with constantly advancing seas from two perspectives: that of the landlubber and that of the seafarer.

[Update, November 2009: The Copenhagen Diagnosis, the heavily peer-reviewed interim update to the IPCC AR4, further validates the sea-level rise assumptions we used in this article: "By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4; for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as ~ 2 meters sea level rise by 2100. Sea level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperatures have been stabilized, and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries."]

Part I: The Global Mistake

In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like:

In a 4°C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100... in a 4°C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India... the people most vulnerable to a 4°C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4°C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape.

And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there?

The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets’ contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC.

Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what’s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject.

What Do We Know?

There are some things that we do know. Based on the volume of ice lying upon the landmass of Greenland, it is quite possible to estimate how far the oceans would rise, should all of it melt away: something in the region of 7.2 metres. That may not seem like a lot, but, as you will see in Part 2 of this series, it will be enough to have devastating consequences for the lower lying parts of the world, which, not coincidentally, are the locations of some of the world’s largest cities. (In fact, there is something you can do to make reading this article more exciting: find out how high above sea level you live, and, as you read along, keep checking to see if your head is still above water.)

Rapid, dramatic change beggars the imagination. The Greenland Ice Sheet is massive, having formed during the first cycle of the most recent major glacial period, and our instinct tells us that it should remain stable in all but the most extreme conditions. It is disconcerting to know that the onset of an ice age can take as little as two decades, implying that an equally sudden melt cannot be ruled out. It is also disconcerting to know that the conditions required for a sudden melt are pretty much guaranteed to occur, and that, in fact, the ice sheet is already melting. We don't have to imagine it. All we have to do is observe:

For the first time since measurements were started [in 2002], the extremely warm summer of 2007 saw a decrease in the ice mass at high altitudes (above 2,000 metres). It also became clear that the ice loss is advancing towards the North of Greenland, particularly on the west coast. The areas around Greenland, particularly Iceland, Spitsbergen and the northern islands of Canada, seem to be particularly badly affected.

This analysis, by the team controlling the GRACE satellite system, is essentially saying that conditions like those in 2007 are able to counteract the damping effect of even the thickest parts of Greenland’s ice sheet. So, when will all the ice melt? There are two schools of thought, but they basically come down to when the temperature of Greenland increases by either 4°C or 8°C above the mean global average of the last 100 years.Four degrees... haven’t we seen that first figure before? In fact, a global rise of 4 degrees corresponds to a considerably larger rise of Arctic temperatures: conventionally this is between 5 and 6 degrees, but if you look at the 2009 Hadley Centre forecasts, a global rise of 4 degrees actually corresponds to an 8 degree rise across much of Greenland. Pick any number you like, but Greenland is melting.

WAIS To Go?

We can take some comfort in the thought that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet would take at least 100 years once it reached that temperature. But it accounts for just 10% of the global ice volume, the other 90% being locked away in the seemingly impermeable heart of Antarctica. Or not: the East Antarctic ice sheet (that’s the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries, but West Antarctica (the peninsula that reaches north toward South America) is not stable at all. The WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) is largely below sea level, having over several million years pushed down and scoured out the bedrock beneath it, but because of its huge area, the part of it that is above water still manages to comprise around 10% of the total Antarctic ice volume. If this were to melt then the oceans would rise by another 5 metres, in addition to the thermal expansion of 1.4 metres, plus whatever has been sloughed off the Greenland ice sheet, giving us 13.6 metres, or close to 45 feet. (Is your head still above water? Please check again now.)

Icebergs and glaciers have been calving from West Antarctica at an accelerating rate over the last decade, which groups such as the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have been carefully monitoring, with increasing alarm. In 2002, to most glaciologists’ horror, the entire Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated. It consisted largely of floating ice, and so despite the immense size of the shelf, this development had no effect on sea levels. But it did presage a new era of rapid ice movement, never before recorded in the modern era. It also had another, even more sinister side-effect on West Antarctica:

An ice bridge connecting the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula to Charcot Island has disintegrated. The event continues a series of breakups that began in March 2008 on the ice shelf, and highlights the effect that climate change is having on the region. Images from the NASA Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on the Terra and Aqua satellites showed the shattering of the ice bridge between March 31, 2009 and April 6, 2009. The loss of the ice bridge, which was bracing the remaining portions of the Wilkins ice shelf, will now allow a mass of broken ice and icebergs to drift into the Southern Ocean.

The Wilkins is following a pattern of instability and rapid collapse that many Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have experienced in recent years. Scientists think that the dramatic loss of these ice shelves, which have existed for hundreds to thousands of years, is an important sign of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere. The loss of an ice shelf can also allow the glaciers that feed into it to start flowing ice into the ocean at an accelerated rate, contributing to a rise in global sea levels.

The last phrase is the most important one; at the moment there is no major concern about the status of most of the WAIS, and the temperature seems to be holding, but if the ice shelves are no longer able to hold back the progress of the glaciers, then they will accelerate towards the sea, themselves causing further instability within the WAIS. Going back to the Hadley Centre article again, it was thought that Greenland was invulnerable to change not so many years ago, but the map produced by the Centre shows warming of between 4 and 10 degrees by 2055. This would still keep the vast majority of Antarctica well below freezing; but ice under extreme pressure can exhibit unusual patterns of behaviour, including increasing internal temperature and self-lubrication. This is what often happens at the bases of deep glaciers, allowing them to slide even when temperatures are well below freezing. The results may continue to confound and horrify glaciologists for years to come while sending the rest of us scampering for higher ground.

A Storm Surge of Forecasts

2001 was the first year we were able to say with any scientific certainty what was likely to happen to global sea level. It seems strange that it should take so long to provide forecasts, but until a consensus on global temperature rise had been achieved, via the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR), then the (supposedly) largest element of the sea level rise equation – the aforementioned thermal expansion – could not be included.

So what did the IPCC say back in 2001? If you read their report, you will discover that of the absolute maximum 0.5 metre rise by 2090, predicted by this august group of scientists, a whopping 74% was due to thermal expansion, with 11cm (22%) dependent on glacier and ice cap melting (mountaintops, essentially), and a miserly 2cm attributable to the possible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But then in this report the absolute worst case “business as usual” model shows a 2°C rise by 2050, which we now know to have been a bit shy of the mark.

Then, in 2007, the landmark 4th Assessment Report raised the bar in both possible temperature rise (from 5.6°C to 6.4°C by 2100) and global sea level rise, to... wait for it... 0.57 metres! Of this new figure, which hardly seems to reflect the immense strides made in feedback loop analysis in the intervening six years, 38 cm or 67% of the rise is attributable to thermal expansion. With this in mind, it would pay to reflect on the types of changes described in this essay, and consider what the IPCC would have predicted had ice sheet melt been included in the final version.

Forward to 2009, and two papers jump out. The first, from the relatively conservative Dr Mark Siddall at the University of Bristol is now talking about a possible rise of 0.82 metres by the end of this century, which is based on the IPCC 4AR maximum temperature of 6.4°C. The second paper, by Grinsted, Moore and Jevrejeva, again based on the IPCC maximum, suggests that a 1.3 metre rise by 2100 is not out of the question. How much of this can be attributed to Greenland and Antarctica is uncertain, but predicting the future based on thermal expansion plus a paleological record of a few thousand years, during which both ice sheets remained fully intact and temperatures never rose above 1.5°C seems a pretty poor basis upon which to predict future tipping points!

If we are to take the two papers at face value and strike a mean of 1.06 metres, by overlaying the latest predictions of temperature rise – which are double the IPCC predictions – we get at least 2 metres globally. That’s just thermal expansion plus a few hundred glaciers and mountaintop ice caps. Now consider what happens when you include the following:

Tipping point effects above 8°C in Greenland

Unknown effects of similar temperature increases on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

Increases in storm surge height and storm intensity caused by a rise in oceanic and atmospheric energy levels due to temperature rise

Increases in inland flooding due to convectional storms upon hardpan (parched clay soils) and more energetic rainstorms from temperature increases

The last two are the inevitable effects of increasing atmospheric energy due to higher temperatures, and are critical because most coastal flooding is the result of either coastal storm surges and high winds, inland flooding inundating river catchments, or a combination of the two. The flooding of eastern England and the Netherlands in 1953, which resulted in the deaths of around 2,500 people, was a combination of a low pressure storm surge, an intense North Sea storm and a high spring tide. Without any inference of global sea level rise, the water rose along the North Sea coast by 4.5 metres.

Via Denmark and the German curve, the storm got closer to the Dutch coast. On the night of the 31st of January, the storm over the North Sea got even stronger, reaching gales of force 11. The Dutch coast was being hit with force 10 winds. The storm continued, and in the south-western Netherlands, wind speeds of force 9 were measured for 20 consecutive hours. The power of the storm drove the water so high that the water was unable to retreat away sufficiently. There was no ebb tide.

Shortly after midnight, the maximum whip up of the water was measured - the wind drove the water up to 3.1 metres. Three hours later, there was a spring tide. Through the combination of this spring tide, and the huge whipping up of the water, at 3hr24, the highest recorded water level was reached - 4.55 metres above NAP (Normal Amsterdam Water Level).

The dikes were not designed to hold such high water levels, and [at] around 3 o’clock that night, the first dikes broke through...

* * *

And so there we have it. A few degrees warmer, a few metres higher, and a couple of decades later, and there we will be, floating about, holding on to other things that float, perching in tree limbs and on rooftops, and hoping to be rescued. We know where we are going to end up eventually: at least 20 metres (65 feet) higher. The one thing we still do not know is how long it will take for us to get there.

We could keep waiting for the scientific community to settle on a consensus forecast, but this may take so long that it will have to be delivered through a snorkel. However, we can already observe that the doubling period of scientific climate forecasts is uncomfortably short, and, to provide for a margin of safety, we should at least double the latest estimates. If the latest forecast is for 2 metres this century, let us assume that we will see at least 4, and plan accordingly.

But do the exact forecasts even matter? We already know enough to say that there is a high probability that ocean levels will rise, significantly, within the lifetimes of most of the people alive today, disrupting the patterns of daily life for much of the world's population, which tends to be clustered along the coastlines and the navigable waterways. We also know that ocean levels will continue to rise far into the future, until they are 20 to 36 metres higher than they are today. We know that continuous coastal erosion and salt water inundation, coastal flooding and displacement of coastal populations, which number in the billions, toward higher ground, will be normal and expected. We also know that there is a high chance these changes will occur based on present carbon dioxide levels, regardless of what is being currently proposed by the governments of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, what we do not know is perhaps most important of all if you are in the middle of all this. We have not considered what ways of inhabiting the changing coastal landscape will remain viable. How will we have to adapt if any of us are to avoid being swept up in a continuous, endless surge of refugees feeling for higher ground, abandoning all they own and all they know? These are the questions that the next two parts of this series of articles will examine.Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things.